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“Gravity is worth asking about”
A blog about software craft and quality
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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Image Compression
Exploiting the quirks of human vision to make images smaller, without looking awful.
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Extremely Low Frequencies
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
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Let's talk space toilets
You should have gone before you left Earth
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Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds
The best ice fishing in the Solar System is worth finding
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Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
(Yes, but.)
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Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata
On building Mr. Baby Paint, a radically simple co-op drawing app for toddlers & accidentally discovering a flood-fill cellular automata, plus developing pixel-fattening algorithms for bitmap fonts.
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Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The idea is simple: If there’s a fire in a tall building that blocks the main stairwell, people need an alternative way to evacuate, preferably one that is somewhat protected or at least far away from where the fire is happening
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What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] New York City is unlike any other city in the United States. It’s the most densely populated area in the country by far, absolutely packed with buildings, business, homes, and people. But for all that you can see walking the str
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Hengefinder: Finding when the sun aligns with your street
Next week in Manhattan, the sunset will align perfectly with the east-west streets of the city grid. It’s beautiful, and people know it. Twice a year, crowds gather to see the brief moment when the sun sits perfectly on the horizon, framed by skyscrapers on either side. It’s called Manhattanhenge , after Stonehenge.
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There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order
What is so special about the number 19?
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China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000
The Radical Asymmetry of Modern Warfare (P2)
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Planet Labs' open satellite feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way
This isn't quite right , but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check:
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Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
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Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics
In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking tha…
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Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely
SpaceX priced its debut at a $1.77 trillion valuation, edging Saudi Aramco's $1.7T for the largest in history. Each block is $25 billion. Aramco was the only company that ever came close; the famous tech IPOs barely register.
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Oral microbiome sequencing after taking probiotics
Recently, a friend recommended BioGaia Prodentis to me. It is a DTC oral probiotic you can buy online that is supposedly good for oral health. I thought it would be interesting to do some sequencing to see what, if anything, it did to my oral microbiome.
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Looks like it is happening
Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date. Numbers using original, not most recen…
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Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists
A gentle introduction to Bayesian statistics for data scientists who, like me, are confused by it.
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An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
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How is music possible
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
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How does Shazam work?
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations: spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.
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Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators
Engineering contraptions
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A ternary plot of citrus geneology
Interactive ternary chart of citrus ancestry
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The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.